Dr. Joseph Ewoodzie is the Vann Asso­ciate Pro­fes­sor of Racial Jus­tice at David­son Col­lege, and a Ghana­ian-Amer­i­can. He uses qual­i­ta­tive meth­ods to exam­ine how mar­gin­al­ized pop­u­la­tions in urban locales make sense of inequal­i­ties in their every­day lives. And he inves­ti­gates how they inter­pret their social selves and order their rela­tion­ships; how they cre­ate, main­tain, and trans­form social and sym­bol­ic bound­aries; and how bound­aries con­strain and enable their lives.

Our Methodology

Dr. Ewoodzie’s work with inequal­i­ties and the impact of mar­gin­al­ized com­mu­ni­ties root­ed our focus to design a web­site that was infor­ma­tive about his work and imple­ment­ed cul­tur­al design ele­ments con­nect­ed to his Ghana­ian roots.

We stud­ied Adinkra sym­bols and the pat­terns they form in their tex­tiles. Each Adinkra sym­bol holds mean­ing and is del­i­cate­ly craft­ed by hand with a cal­abash stamp. We want­ed every ele­ment of his web­site design to func­tion as sym­bol­ic com­mu­ni­ca­tion, not just aes­thet­ics. We cre­at­ed a unique pat­tern inspired by the Adinkra sym­bols to respect the his­toric her­itage behind these sym­bols.

To fur­ther the sym­bol­ic con­nec­tions, we used turquoise to con­nect with com­pas­sion, pos­si­bil­i­ties, tran­quil­i­ty, and cul­tur­al pro­tec­tion. In con­trast, the deep red sym­bol­izes bold love, root­ed in his­tor­i­cal pain for inde­pen­dence but trans­formed into a pas­sion for change. The green hue con­nects to Ghana’s lush land­scape and nature, while the gold­en-yel­low brings the sun’s warmth, joy, and gen­er­a­tional strength. We also added accents of pur­ple to con­nect with wis­dom, roy­al­ty, and lead­er­ship. These hues cre­at­ed a bold expres­sion of his work and cel­e­brat­ed his heritage.